Path 2

Path 2

Gun-Toting Man in Wetsuit Washes Up on Jones Beach

May 11, 2011

Mysteriously, Pablo Perez, a man from Queens, washed up on Jones Beach yesterday. More mysteriously, he was wearing a wetsuit, carrying a gun, and “mumbling that he’d just spent three days adrift on a raft,” reports the New York Post. “He didn’t look quite right,” noted Gary Smith, who ran into him during his daily walk on the beach. Three days adrift on a raft will do that to a person!

“All of a sudden, I see this big fella in a daze wandering along the boardwalk with a garbage bag over his body — he was easily six-three and over 300 pounds,” said Gary Smith of Wantagh.

When Smith told Perez he would call 911, Perez mentioned his gun, which ultimately had to be cut out of his wetsuit. Perez was then charged with criminal possession of a weapon and hospitalized for dehydration and exhaustion. His story is that he’d been fishing and that his raft, tied to another boat, got loose and he drifted out to sea.

The situation has been described as “a very unusual incident” as well as excellent fodder for a remake of that one book by Ernest Hemingway.